


Unmoored

by misszeldasayre



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Based on a Taylor Swift Song, Bittersweet, Canon Compliant, Dreams, Evermore - Freeform, F/M, Inspired by Taylor Swift, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28336353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misszeldasayre/pseuds/misszeldasayre
Summary: Rey discovers that fighting off sadness after Ben’s death is like fighting to keep sand out of her mouth in Jakku: an impossible task. Although his spirit visits her in her dreams, she can’t resign herself to a world without him, which worries everyone close to her until Ben soothes her grief.
Relationships: Finn/Rose Tico, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16
Collections: Reylo Evermore Flash Fic





	Unmoored

When his body slumps, slipping from her trembling hands to the stone floor of the citadel, it thuds—soft, dull, but solid. A declaration that the man once called Ben Solo is gone and the scavenger called Rey is alone once again.

In a daze, she flies back to the Resistance, lugging the corpse of a man that she once thought might become her family. She buries him on Ajan Kloss after slipping away from celebrations that spill into the night. Dirt clings beneath her nails, in the grooves of her knuckles, in the fabric of her pants. She lets it stay, a reminder of Ben’s sacrifice, until Finn gently leads to the ‘fresher and scrubs the dirt from her hands when she refuses to do it herself. A little dirt fades in the face of an empty future.

After scrubbing her clean, Finn leads Rey to an empty bunk, drawing a thin coverlet over her crumpled body and stroking a tentative hand through her hair as she can’t choke back sobs. “We won,” he says. “We won.”

“It cost too much,” she whispers back, then allows the darkness hovering at the corners of her vision to eclipse the pain sulking atop her chest.

Ben visits her dreams that night, with hair soft as the brush of his lips against hers. She runs her hands through it before a small part of her brain ascertains that this isn’t reality. Not that it matters. This echo of their bond through the Force warms her. It cuts through the numbness lingering in her limbs.

“You’re back,” she says. A lie, but she can’t bear the alternative. It’s not in her nature to give up hope, even when it’s cruelly dangled beyond her reach. They stand pressed together, the only signs of life in a barren orange desert much like the one Rey grew up in.

“I’m not gone. Not really.” His voice is deeper, gravelly. Whatever rest that fools promise death will bring seems to have eluded Ben Solo. Rey wonders if the same grief scrapes both their throats raw.

His familiar words bring her little comfort, the Jedi beliefs hanging loose on her bones like hand-me-down robes. Extracting her hand from his, she folds her arms to hide their tremble. “But you’re not here.”

His chuckle is more admonishment than amusement. “Luke taught you better.”

“Oh, so you’re one with the Force? Your spirit’s become part of the grass, the rain, the Porg shit staining your father’s ship?” Her laughter grows bitter, hysterical. Dream-Ben’s eyebrows knit together with concern, but Rey pushes on. “Let me guess—you’re with me wherever I go?”

He counters her irreverence with a nod far too serious for her liking. “I am. I will be with you until you cross over into this… world.”

Rey’s sight blurs, sharpens, and blurs again. She wonders how long they have left in this stolen moment, so she reaches for him again, savoring the heat of his hand against hers.

“In Snoke’s throne room, aboard the Supremacy, you asked me to join you.”

He hesitates. She feels it in the miniscule tightening of each of his fingers against hers. “Yes.”

“Ask me again.”

“Not now. Not until—”

“Until when? Until I live a long, lonely life, half a dyad that’s split between worlds?” Scalding tears slip down her cheeks. Swiping them away would mean removing her hands from his, so she lets them fall to the sand blurring underfoot.

She’d put the whole world on pause for a few more minutes with Ben, but alertness steals into her dreamscape and with it, a shiver that jolts her awake before she can say farewell. Sometime in the night it must have begun raining again, a humid rain that clatters on the durasteel roof and leaves Rey scrambling to find the blanket she kicked off in her sleep. Closing her eyes, willing herself back into that dusty orange dream, changes nothing. So she lays huddled on her cot until Finn returns to check on her, Rose at his side. Her eyes swim with loss and melted Haysian smelt. She may understand Rey’s grief better than Finn, but understanding doesn’t bring back their dead.

Rey’s heard tales of Resistance fighters who lost limbs in battle and felt phantom pains tingling where flesh used to grow. Losing Ben leaves her off-kilter, unable to regain her balance, her lips tingling where they last touched his. As Ajan Kloss slowly empties of Resistance members—some moving to fill the First Order’s void, others returning to individual pursuits—Rey wonders what her place is in all of this, a nobody who trained to fight Kylo Ren and finally vanquished him against her will. Now that he’s gone, she has nothing to contribute to the new world but a dusty set of sacred Jedi texts and the remnants of a dying order. Sometimes she wonders if it would be easier to die than to trek onward, lugging responsibilities she doesn’t want. She wonders if Luke felt the same before winking out of existence on Ahch-To.

When Finn approaches her about shipping out with him and Rose on the _Millennium Falcon_ , Rey jumps at the offer, shoving her spare tunics and staff in a pack before scrambling after him without a backward glance at the base. As she boards the freighter, twin blue lightsabers weigh down her pack. They reek of lost opportunities. Rey vows to make her own before igniting the Skywalker blades again.

At first, Rose and Finn engage Rey at every opportunity, chatting when she straggles into the galley or takes a shift in the copilot’s seat. They try involving her in course charting, meal planning, and supply running. Her subdued responses do little to dissuade them from prodding the life back into her, but eventually she manages to slip away. Once she retreats, their worried whispers follow her down the corridors. Pretending to be fine exhausts her almost as much as the grief.

So she spends more time sleeping than waking. As she sleeps, Ben comes to her in visions concocted by her desperate imagination or maybe some otherworldly power, visions that let her touch him again but never for long enough. Sometimes she dreams of a Ben robed in brown who was never driven from the Jedi temple. Other times she trades barbs with a Kylo Ren more wraith than monster. She meets variations of her savior that spark both desire and despair, a thousand versions of a desolate past and an impossible future. Their dream exchanges allow her to start again, to tamper with the path that led her here to this narrow bunk on a scrap-metal ship, Finn and Rose hovering above her crumpled form.

They don’t believe her when she says she’s fine. But they also don’t know how to cope with a grief big enough to swallow the _Falcon_ whole. When she drags her eyes open, Rey doesn’t miss the way Rose leans into Finn, the way he lays a comforting hand on her shoulder. Because they have each other, they can’t understand her, not for want of trying. In the end, it’s their effort to understand that tethers Rey to the ship. Without it, she might go spinning out into the black unknown in search of Ben.

He comes as her Ben one night, broad and dripping in salt spray from a roiling ocean on the horizon. Their bond fizzles when Rey reaches for him. She draws back a dripping hand. “You’re gone,” she hisses, angry at his outstretched palm. “You’re gone, and I’m lost.”

“You’re not lost,” he says, that cool determination she once loathed, but grew to love, whipping her into a frenzy. What does he know of losing his way? His journey ended in the most ignominious of ways: in an abandoned throne room to defeat a husk of the emperor. It’s Rey who knows loss, who can’t escape the thud of Ben’s body echoing in her mind.

“I will always be with you.” He reaches out, tapping her heart, reclaiming her hand, letting rivulets stream from his hair onto her skin as he pulls her in for an embrace.

She longs to shout at him, remind him that her parents loved her and left her, too. To tell him that she’s no Skywalker with a family legacy of sacrifice and love. Her legacy is abandonment and hunger for a family that will never materialize. But the pain wires shut her jaw, leaves her gasping for air when she startles awake, feet twisted in bedsheets and cries leaking from her throat.

Finn and Rose exchange worried looks when she drags herself from her bunk to the transparisteel cockpit window, planting herself in the copilot’s seat and letting star systems flicker past without registering a single one. What do those pinpricks of light matter anyway? Although they teem with multitudes of lifeforms, none of them contain the man who breathed his life into Rey’s body, whose red sparking spirit courses through her veins.

She didn’t ask for it, Ben’s sacrifice. The stupid bright stars flashing by with every breath she heaves with stolen air. The gaping loss weaving tight tendrils around her stomach, a parasite she can’t shake. It leaves her with a shrinking appetite and a growing apathy as Finn and Rose begin to discuss the future in an attempt to shake Rey from her transparisteel stupor. They talk about new supply runs to establish, old Resistance friends to visit, distant star systems to explore. Their smiles diminish as they throw each offer at Rey only to receive vacant nods in return. They can tell her heart’s not in it, and they don’t push, not until their meeting with Poe.

The first time they met up with Poe after the First Order crumbled was out of necessity; now they make plans to meet up for pleasure, reconnecting after months of separation. The night before the _Millennium Falcon_ touches down on Atzerri to rendezvous with Poe, Rey dreams of Ben again.

Her most recent dreams morphed into flames and shrapnel, a burning throne room and a question she tries responding to a dozen different ways. (She learns that no response will bring Ben back, but that doesn’t stop her from replaying every footstep that led them to this place.)

Yet tonight is different. They are back in the desert again, sand as far as the eye can see and no lightswords strapped to their hips. Tonight is no battle, and the thought makes Rey nervous after fighting this ghost for so long. So she stands still, letting the sand wisp around her ankles as Ben squints in her direction. He stares so long she wonders if he can really see her. Then he smiles, small but genuine, an echo of their first kiss.

His tentative smile spreads as if baffled by his good fortune, acting like a soothing salve on her burning lungs. She basks in its healing glow until it fades into concern as he looks her up and down, taking in her gaunt cheeks and spindly calves. He opens his mouth, then closes it again, jaw working over invisible questions that Rey loves him for not asking. One glance at him and she can see her pain mirrored in the slump of his shoulders, the tightness in his eyes.

She can’t bear being his source of pain, so she pastes on a rusty grin and tells him about how she repaired the _Falcon’s_ landing gear when it stuck, how she failed at shooing the Porgs out from the ship, how she made Finn laugh hard enough to snort muja berry juice from his nose. In turn, he tells her about a world more dark than light, a velvet sky stitched with silver stars that mock him by glittering when he screams. It’s not all bad, he says, not when he gets to see her in spurts, not when he feels deep in his bones that once she joins him they’ll be able to wander together toward the light.

His voice cracks when he says that, but then he shrugs, ever Han Solo’s defiant son. Reduced to a black silhouette surrounded by orange sun and sand, he looks small. Rey bridges the gap between them, drawing him as close as she can until they’re panting for more.

“I can’t keep going by myself,” she sighs once they collapse into a heap in the sand, legs tangled and hair mussed.

“You’re not alone.” He sweeps loose hair back from her face before tracing her jaw. While his touch brings her comfort, she knows it won’t last. Already a thin black border in her periphery threatens to pull them apart as her dream decays.

She leans into him, soaking up the illusion as long as it lasts. “I don’t want you in another life. I want you in this one.”

He pulls her in for a kiss so tender it leaves her wondering who was important enough to defeat if this was the cost. Too soon Ben’s face begins flickering into darkness. He murmurs something low into her hair, but Rey can’t make it out over her racing pulse. 

“What?” The darkness spreads quickly, obscuring her vision, but she still strains to make out his reply. The dream dissolves before he can finish. Rey wakes, a tangle of hair and sheets, sweating and screaming and falling silent only when she realizes Ben isn’t there to answer her call.

The dream occupies her thoughts as she helps Finn and Rose land the freighter at the Talos spaceport and follows them to a nearby cantina to meet Poe. As they settle into a booth, Rey watches her friends strike up their familiar friendship, wishing she could join in the conversation without second guessing every word.

Finn and Rose recount their supply runs for the nascent New Republic, while Poe regales them with tales of old smuggling adventures gone awry. Strands of grey hair pepper his curls, but underneath he’s the same cocky flyboy who stared down a fleet of star destroyers in nothing but an X-wing. For a moment, his sameness brings peace to Rey’s brittle heart. Then Poe shrugs, an achingly familiar gesture out of place on his thin shoulders, and Rey excuses herself, mumbling about another round of drinks. Fighting off the sadness is like fighting to keep sand out of her mouth in Jakku: an impossible task. Better she hide it than allow it to suffocate their party.

When Rey returns, balancing three glasses, Finn grins far brighter than he has in months. The corners of his mouth stretch just a shade too wide and his eyes gleam desperately. “We were just telling Poe how we’re flying to Chandrila tomorrow.”  
Rey freezes, all white knuckles and wide krugga deer eyes at Finn’s announcement. “Why?”

Finn doesn’t flinch at the bite in her voice, too familiar with it by now. “General—er, Senator Organa’s orders. We’re picking up a package from her old friend and delivering it straight to her.”

Poe nods, impressed. “Must be something special if she’s asking you to deliver it.”

Rey’s glass hits the table too hard on its way down, turning heads in her direction. “Why not someone else?” Leia should understand better than anyone else why Rey can’t go there. Not when Ben’s loss has painted her grey. “Tell her to get someone else.”

Finn lays a calming hand on her arm, always meeting the brunt of her irritation with mercy. “Rey, I don’t know—”

“No,” Rose interjects, pounding her own glass against the greel-wood table. “Enough is enough. Nine months of you moping around the ship! Nothing we do seems to ease your pain. I want to take it away, but I can’t. The only person who can do that is you, and you won’t pull your head out of your cockpit long enough to try.”

Poe’s joviality has shifted into something akin to pity. It stings more than the the truth of Rose’s words. Rey can’t meet Finn’s sympathetic smile across the booth, so she mumbles an apology to Rose and ducks into the ‘fresher, fighting the urge to swing her staff through the mirror as her flushed cheeks and brimming eyes stare back at her.

“I can’t do this, Ben,” she whispers even though his spirit is nowhere to be found. Years of yearning for lost parents, only to remain abandoned, compound her grief for him—for what might have been between them. Momentarily she longs for it all to disappear: the First Order and the Resistance, the Sith and the Jedi, the warrior and the scavenger. Surely a future foraging on Jakku would have held less pain than this timeline. Maybe she could have eked out enough credits to rent a hovel, buy a few extra portions each month, find someone worn down by the desert sands and start a family with them. Cultivate some version of happiness that traders gossiped about at the Niima Outpost.

For a moment, Rey longs for peace.

Then she sees it sprawl before her flickering past in rapid succession, all the things that would be lost were she never to know Ben: manacled wrists in a dark interrogation room, a scarred face and two gleaming lightswords, hands meeting across a liminal space, a chase that spans planets, a kiss that heals scars. Her Force-fueled connection with Ben forged the kind of intimacy that creates a vacuum when it disappears. But without it, she wouldn’t know the joy of finally belonging. And that belonging is what allows her lungs to keep heaving on borrowed breath, her fingers to fly ships far from that nightmarish throne room, her mind to design a lightsaber not Skywalker blue or Sith Lord red, but a color all her own.

For a moment, Rey finds peace in her pain.

“It hurts,” she admits to Poe when she returns from the ‘fresher to find him sitting by himself at the bar, Finn and Rose having snuck back to the _Falcon_ for a little alone time. Rey can’t blame them, not when they put up with her dreary presence in cramped corners. They deserve a little space for themselves, the chance to fuck without worrying Rey will overhear and break into a million pieces remembering all the firsts she and Ben were supposed to share. Dead though he may be, Rey refuses to indulge in those firsts without him, so she keeps her legs closed along with her heart and stays away from watery planets—the kind he promised to take her to see once the war ended.

So that’s how Rey finds herself alone with Poe, sipping her third Corellian Twister as he sways on a stool at her side. “It hurts,” she repeats.

He eyes her over the rim of his own empty glass before banging on the bar for another round. Then he nods, confirming the pain that the well-meaning Finn and Rose have brushed under the thrusters since the Resistance disbanded. Rey’s chest aches at the gesture. She blames it on the liquor.

“You’re a survivor,” he says with another shrug so familiar it compounds the ache in Rey’s chest. “It’s what we do.”

Every freckle burned across her cheeks from the Jakku sun, every scrap metal scar crisscrossing her knuckles, every furrowed line etched into her brow attests to her ability to survive. After all, she’s a scavenger. A nobody with a borrowed lightsaber and a stolen name, the last of a lost civilization. All she has left to do is survive.

Poe understands, scrappy from years of bouncing between caretakers and running spice. He survives, no matter the cost: scars on his ship’s wings or battle wrinkles framing his eyes. He understands the pain of losing someone too dear to speak about, of longing for a future that can never be. “We keep flying until the fuel runs out.”

Unbidden, a memory of Ben’s TIE Silencer streaks across Rey’s mind, jet black windows doing little to conceal its pilot’s raging longing. Then Luke’s X-wing—a swampy, dripping mess—rising out of the water at its master’s behest. Then Han’s _Falcon_ with its clanking landing gear and Porg-infested corridors. Although these ships’ pilots have dissolved into stardust and memories, they still take to the sky under new hands.

Rey gulps down the last of her drink, then turns to the man at her side. “Please do something for me.”

“Anything.”

“Tell Finn and Rose…” Here she pauses. How can she sum up a hundred lonely nights in their company? All the words that come to mind feel trite, empty, wrong. But she presses on. “Tell them thank you. And goodbye. I had to do this.”

“Do what?” Poe asks, but the gleam in his eye suggests that he already knows. He raises his glass—a salute or a farewell, Rey can’t tell. Then she’s scrambling into her cloak and out of the cantina. As she marches away from Poe, away from the _Falcon_ , a few whistles pelt her back, accompanied by a familiar whirring sound. When Rey spins to face her pursuant, BB-8 greets her with another flurry of beeps.

“Poe sent you, huh?” She spins back around without breaking her stride. “Tell him I don’t need a copilot.”

Flustered whistles scold her, but she remains unrepentant. “People keep telling me they know what I need. Don’t join them.”

He chirps a series of reproaches that Rey tries to tune out, but a part of her aches for company even as she runs from her chosen family. So she lets him follow her, reaching down to pat him between the antennae once she’s sure he won’t pivot and roll back to Poe. “You can stay,” she says. “But we’re flying out tonight.”

His beeps affirmatively and follows her to the docks without further debate. There Rey charters a small star skiff with the coins left over from running supplies. She flies to Ilum and Trask, wades through snow high as her hip and water that laps at her ankles, rises at dawn and retires at sunset and tells dream-Ben about every adventure with BB-8 by her side. He shares the coordinates to old smugglers’ ports that his father frequented, recommends she visit Endor to meet the Ewoks from his mother’s bedtime stories, and encourages her to watch the sunset envelop Bespin. With his memories as her guide, she almost believes he’s sitting beside her through every jump to hyperspace.

As Rey travels the galaxy, she cannibalizes her staff to create a lightsaber hilt all her own, lacking the polish of the Skywalker sabers, but fitting more comfortably in her palms. Wrapped in cloth ripped from her the fringe of her tunic, its blade flickers yellow in the darkness. When she first ignites it, BB-8 whistles in approval. It softens the pang in her heart as she wishes Ben was here to celebrate. But she tells him about her creation in their dreamworld, and he beams so widely that she forgets the pang.

She screams at him one night after visiting Chandrila for the first time at his behest, Hanna City washing her vision grey and turning her tongue chalky. Pain that had dulled to a throb returns in full force as though Ben gasped his final breaths in her arms only yesterday. “You told me I could handle it!” she screams at him when he appears that night. Her desert dreamscape has shifted from desert to green rolling hills lined with trees. The trees shake with the force of her fury.

He holds her close, letting her tears track down his black tunic, brushing them away only when she leans into his touch. “It’s just another planet you hadn’t seen.”

“It was your home,” she protests. “And it’s empty without you.”

Always able to read past Rey’s mask, Ben hones in on the loneliness that clings to her no matter how much she tries to embrace their separation. “It won’t feel like this forevermore. Someday I’ll meet you between worlds.”

The idea of a reunion no longer tempts nor paralyzes Rey. While she’ll welcome it when the time comes, she still has hundreds of star systems to explore and the remnants of the Jedi Order stashed aboard her ship. There will be time for her and Ben, but now is the time for life. Time to honor his gift by seeking joy and repairing the damage Kylo Ren inflicted across the galaxy.

She seals his promise with a kiss. “Until then, stay with me.”

“I will always be with you.”

His words echo their first shared dream following his death. This time they usher in a peculiar certainty that sinks deep into Rey’s bones. This time, she believes him. When their dreamworld fades, Rey wakes in a cramped bunk, a smile on her lips instead of a scream.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to [ bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark) for creating this challenge! :)
> 
> This story was inspired by [ evermore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXLgZZE072g), the duet by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver that closes out (and titles) the album. Let me know what you think of this fic (or what your favorite song is off of folklore + evermore! I adore illicit affairs, champagne problems, and mirrorball).
> 
> If you enjoyed this piece, you may want to check out the other submissions in the [ Reylo Evermore Flash Fic collection](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/reyloevermoreflashfic). :)


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